The 50th Walker Cup concluded at Cypress Point in California on Sunday. The USA won by 17 points to 9. That was no surprise. Great Britain & Ireland have only won nine of those 50 matches, only two of them in America. When GB&I took a 3-1 lead after the opening session of foursomes on Saturday, there was hope. Of course, it’s always the hope that kills you. The US won five of the eight singles that afternoon and I suspect very few people outside the away locker room gave its inhabitants much hope on Sunday.
This blog, however, is about the venue rather than the victors or the visitors. Cypress Point is one of the most beautiful courses on earth. It has been called ‘the Sistine Chapel of Golf’. The course lies within the Del Monte Forest, or at least it does until it arrives at the Pacific coastline. The landscape offers a spectacular contrast between the emerald grasses of the course and the chalky white sand of the imposing dunes, a vision enhanced by the intermittent appearance on the scene of the extraordinary Monterey cypress trees. The overall sight induced the American writer, O.B. Keeler, to describe the course as “the crystallisation of the dream of an artist who had been drinking gin and sobering up on absinthe”. So not your average afternoon at Wetherspoon’s.
Keeler was effectively the official biographer of Bobby Jones, the golfer who achieved the original Grand Slam in 1930. Jones was also the founder of Augusta National, and Cypress Point played a significant role in its creation. Jones was shockingly knocked out in the first round of the US Amateur Championship in 1929. That was at Pebble Beach. With some unexpected spare time on his hands, Jones took his sticks a mile down the road to Cypress Point. He loved what he saw and commissioned its architect to work on his own new course in Georgia. That man was Alister MacKenzie, who only got the gig at Cypress after the death of the club’s first choice, Seth Raynor. Such can be fate.
Like many par-72 layouts, Cypress has four par-fives and four par-threes. But other courses don’t have them like this. Three of the fives come in the first six holes, two of them in succession. By the 10th that’s the end of them. The most famous holes are the three beside the ocean. The 15th and 16th are consecutive par-threes, the first being a pitch to a well-protected green and the latter requiring a hearty blast with something big to make the carry over the Pacific. The 17th may be the best hole of them all; a drive over the water followed by an approach which also flirts with the briny.
It has to be said that the 18th is something of an anti-climax. It’s an uphill dogleg to the right, perhaps reminiscent of nowhere more than…the 18th at the MacKenzie-designed Augusta National. Jimmy Demaret, who won the Masters there on three occasions, called Cypress “the best 17-hole course in the world”. It’s a rather back-handed compliment and this glorious course deserves better than that, but I get what he meant.
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